Where Does Opportunity Lie in the Global Supply Chain?
Industry Leaders Weigh In on Where We Are & What’s Next
With #supplychainissues today at an all-time high, we are seeing firsthand how fragile our global logistics networks are. Alpaca’s Aubrie Pagano has led an ongoing investigation of these issues for more than a year, with her research culminating in our latest Field Study, a recently published four-part white paper on the current state and future of global e-commerce supply chains.
On the heels of this new research — you can dive deeper in Field Study: Global Supply Chains (Part 1) and Field Study: Global Supply Chains (Part 2) — we were excited to showcase a panel of industry-leading voices for a live conversation on the challenges facing founders in the landscape and the opportunities we see ahead.
Moderated by Alex Konrad, Senior Editor, Forbes, this virtual event welcomed panelists Aubrie Pagano, General Partner at Alpaca, Dave Anderson, Managing General Partner at Supply Chain Ventures, Drew McElroy, Co-Founder & Chairman, Transfix, Rachel Holt, General Partner at Construct Capital and Rick Zullo, General Partner Equal Ventures.
Among the many questions raised during the event:
- Why are we seeing so many supply chain issues now, two years after the start of the global pandemic?
- What does the future hold for the Global E-Commerce Supply Chain?
- Where is the white space for opportunity and investment?
- What areas are investors excited about?
- What are the different issues and opportunities tied to specific stakeholders in the supply chain such as trucking companies, rail freight, cross-border logistics and more?
- Can drones make any measurable difference?
Key takeaways
This has been a long time coming
“We were already in a major transition before COVID, before Ukraine, before any of these other disruptions, in terms of the e-commerce revolution and the movement from what I’ll call a linear supply chain where you move something from a supplier to a plant, you make it, you get it shipped to a distributor, they shipped it to a retailer, and then somebody went to the store and bought it and brought it home. As we all know, those days are gone and omnichannel is omnipresent in terms of processes. And the tricky part is that our technology has nowhere near kept up to it. Most companies today have 30-, 40-year-old technology.” — Dave Anderson, Supply Chain Ventures
It’s still early, early days
“You have to rip and replace the existing infrastructure to go from an economy of scale verticalization approach to something that’s much more network-based, much more decentralized. And with physical and digital infrastructure together, that’s not something that can happen overnight. This is a 20- to 30-year cycle that will play out. Our point of view is that we’re the first bat of the first inning of that transition.” — Rick Zullo, Equal Ventures
Data is king
“The truth is that the supply chain is an ongoing, dynamic problem that requires dynamic solutions. And whether you’re a shipper or a carrier or an intermediary, the more you are using data to be out in front of all the understanding of what’s happening, the more you can mitigate the pain.” — Drew McElroy, Transfix
Cross-border commerce is challenging, but inevitable
“We’ve been thinking a lot about cross border commerce. Like there’s sort of silos around people doing business country to country or continent to continent. I come from a very consumer-driven lens of, where’s the consumer going? There’s just such a halo effect and such a global culture that we live in now, especially for younger generations. And our supply chain is still replatforming its core infrastructure. We are not equipped to have a good shipped from Ohio really seamlessly to a woman in Indonesia who’s just a fan of the brand. So we’ve been looking a lot at how that infrastructure ends up changing crossborder.” — Aubrie Pagano, Alpaca
The mainstays are ripe for investment
“One area that we’re particularly excited about is in the freight rails. There has been tremendous innovation that has happened in almost every other area of supply chain besides rail. Historically, there are many reasons why it’s been ignored. It’s the most painful stack to try to modernize. But it is, if you think about just sort of the macro tailwinds that are coming behind sustainability, it’s far more sustainable behind driver shortages. It actually can be hyper-efficient to send things on freight rail. And when we first started diving into this industry, it was remarkable to me that even the most basic visibility layers weren’t present in freight rail. So I think we still are seeing these big white space opportunities, and I think it speaks to just like the size and scale of this industry.” — Rachel Holt, Construct Capital
For more from the panel, including their take on which areas are most appealing to investors right now, watch the full event here.
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